Everyone has come to the point when someone says to you, “I don’t even know who you are anymore.” Daily, I ponder my own identity, as many college students do as they go on their quest to “find themselves.” I’ve heard it said, “He who holds the definitions holds the power.” So often we let other people and other things define who we are. Have you ever gotten so far from who you really are that you even surprise yourself when you act?
Many college students allow their sport, major, clique or fraternity to define them, as opposed to defining the entity through their involvement. It amazes me time and time again, but we all know someone who transformed from who they were in high school to someone totally different in college. These people defied the definition set for them and decided they would rewrite their own story.
It’s mind-blowing to see the freshmen who were the biggest binge drinkers become the most spiritually sound seniors, and the biggest slackers become the biggest achievers. I love it. I grin from ear to ear because I see definitions erased and rewritten.
Some of us think we can’t escape it — that if we dare to defy the definition of who everyone else thinks we should be, we will be letting down our closest friends and family members. Paul Laurence Dunbar put it best when he said, “We wear the mask, the grins and lies, it hides our teeth and shades our eyes.” We wear this mask so much we forget it’s there.
Some of us allow legacies to define us; those “large donations” and even larger-than-life family members who got us where we are and expect us to become who they paid for us to be. These legacies lock ministers into engineering school, teachers into law school and community activists into medical schools that they don’t want to be in. Even on the other end of the spectrum, legacies of being the first to go to college, the first to go to and graduate from college, the first to make it past 18 without getting pregnant, go to and graduate from college. The pressure becomes us. We no longer define ourselves but instead allow expectations of this legacy to define us. Can’t let pops, who gave the University $10 million, down — or disappoint mom by disallowing her to see her first child actually get a degree. And in the meantime, these legacies become us.
We even let cultures define us. But this is a definition that is even more convoluted than the rest. Culture many times brings about great definitions. The Ashanti people are given credit for the well-known proverb “I am because we are.” It is so simplistic yet profound. In Africa, the Diasporas people define themselves in terms of their communities, setting aside individualism.
I love this proverb because it is a part of the way I define myself.
However, cultural definitions can also be just as exclusive as they are inclusive. In some cultures, women are defined as less than men; in others, young people are discounted; and some even value darker-skinned brothers as less human than lighter-skinned ones.
Definitions are what send college students on long sabbaticals from school, on mission trips, into a drunken abyss or even into certain social circles as they seek to figure out who they are. It’s just like the story of the circus elephant we all saw as children — that huge elephant tied to a tiny stake in the ground. The reason the circus folks could use such a tiny stake is that when the elephant was a baby, that stake was too heavy for him to uproot even though he tried and tried to get away. As the elephant got older he stopped trying, and even though he became big enough to easily uproot the stake, his mind says that he can’t do it. So he doesn’t even try to get away, he just stays tied to the stake.
Do we have this elephant’s mentality? Tied to the stake of family expectations, legacies, societal norms, other people’s opinions or even our own fears? To avoid wasting time and energy trying to “find ourselves,” we have to let that stake go. Realize that we can make our own definitions of who we are. Just pick up the stake and leave the circus.
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